One of Our 50 Is Missing

Rueful anecdotes about New Mexico's mistaken geographical identity, since 1970.

INN FROM THE COLD

A flurry of emails landed in our “Missing” inbox after msn.com picked up a Business Insider slide-show story, “The Best Hotel in Every State,” and ran it on their homepage. New Hampshire’s slide gave way to New York’s, with nary a mention of the Land of Enchantment. A couple of days later, a subsequent review showed that New Mexico had been added. The hotel? Santa Fe’s Inn of the Five Graces.

STUCK IN THE PAST

Linda Serna is a professional genealogist based in Huntington Beach, California. She does a lot of research for clients with family roots in New Mexico. She uses Ancestry.com quite frequently, and usually finds it to be helpful, except when doing research for her New Mexico clients. “Every time I would put ‘New Mexico’ into the search box and check ‘exact match,’ only records from Old Mexico would come up. I called Ancestry and brought this problem to their attention. The young man I spoke with had a hard time realizing that New Mexico was not a part of Old Mexico.” She told him that New Mexico had become part of the United States of America in 1912 and had been a state for over 100 years. “He assured me that he would put in a request to troubleshoot this and see why Ancestry wasn’t giving the correct results. We’ll see what happens.”

CUTTING REMARK

As Chris Marchiondo got his last haircut before moving to New Mexico from Michigan, he let his barber know about his plans. “Mexico! Wow!” she exclaimed. Marchiondo mentioned the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and New Mexico again, trying to tactfully clear up the misunderstanding. It was all to no avail. As he stood up to leave, she said, “Well, I don’t know what kind of clippers they use in Mexico, but hopefully they speak enough English to understand what you need!”

FLAGGED ERROR

In The Washington Post’s cheeky June 23 article titled “Every State Flag Is Wrong, and Here Is Why,” the author ribbed us for the simplicity of our Zia flag by conjecturing that its designers reasoned, “Look, we’re going to be next to Nevada. How hard do we have to try?” Funny, yes—because Nevada is not one of our next-door neighbors.